


so we can be more than a cautionary tale

by TheElusiveOllie



Series: New Game+ [1]
Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Everyone Has Issues, Everyone Is Alive, Everyone Needs A Hug, Gen, Identity Issues, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Mental Health Issues, Nonbinary Chara and Frisk, POV Alternating, Panic Attacks, Platonic Soulmates, Recovery, Self-Harm, mind sharing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-07
Updated: 2017-05-07
Packaged: 2018-10-29 04:56:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10846911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheElusiveOllie/pseuds/TheElusiveOllie
Summary: In which three kids are actively In The Shit and wholly unequipped to deal with it. Everybody lives, and they do it in the same way that most living things typically do: messily, clumsily, and with no instruction manual to any of this whatsoever. Sacrifices are made. People are frustrated and frustrating. Recovery is messy. Nothing is easy.





	1. nothing gold

**Author's Note:**

> For Snap, always and forever. The entirety of this fic series, however long it may take to complete, is dedicated to you.

**Nature’s first green is gold,** **  
** **Her hardest hue to hold.**

\--

 

 

It’s breaking off a piece of yourself and slotting it into a too-small cubbyhole, improperly, with careful adjustments and nudges with the tips of fingers and the warmth of a palm pressed over the wash of crimson. Dual fragmentations peel off into the ether, and tripled sensations pass over your ears in a rush of stolen memory. It’s like a key change in an old tune - three sets of eyes blinking open, three sequences of breaths being taken, the spun-gold threads of sunlight bathing the yellow petals carpeted beneath in a warm cast.

Dust motes spin in lazy eddies, coiling about in currents of air that take them listlessly up and away again, while some settle upon shoulders and hair and tickle the hairs of your nose.

It’s alight in the crinkle of red leaves underfoot; in the crunch of snow and the bright skid of shoes over ice; in the way mud sinks up past your thighs when you step into the water; in the burn of heat against skin; in the solemn silence of smooth gray walls that stretch on without obvious end. It’s the snap of a SOUL breaking in two, and then into minute, scarlet particles, and then - not being broken any longer. It’s in the pneumatic hiss of elevator doors and the startling greenness of vines.

It’s reaching for your SAVE file.

And cleaving through it with a sharp, precise motion.

It’s going to pieces, again. But you’ve been in pieces before, fragments painted red and pinwheeling harmlessly off into the dark before things snap to before they were ever broken in the first place. You’ve felt it enough to note the similarities with a clinical distance that should, perhaps, scare you. Should, but doesn’t. It’s just death, and dying. And dying hurts, but routine never stings quite so much. It’s part of what makes it routine.

And so the first time was much like the first cut - reassuring in the give of flesh, the pulse of crimson. Like redemption. Like penance.

But in a sickening twist of fate, or foolishness, or whatever one likes to call it, simply giving over one’s SOUL is impossible. Not even to save all of monsters.

Not without something to pry apart the pieces holding it together.

It’s not the ruthless, worldwide cleansing of an ERASE. Not the glow of a pulsing SAVE, fingers of golden light streaming out delicately from between clasped hands, as beautiful as a star but a thousand times more immediate. The warmth suffusing your entire body that left it clean and whole, not quite a hug but the closest thing to it after the slamming shut of the Ruins door - it isn’t like that at all. It’s not the spear that pinions time into stillness, the failsafe to retreat to should your SOUL splinter and crack, as it tends to do.

It’s raw, and it’s inelegant, and it’s so very, very

_Messy._

* Determination.

 

 

\--

 **Her early leaf’s a flower;** **  
** **But only so an hour.**

\--

 

 

The tangle of pollen and dust catching in your throat, eliciting a sharp gag and a spluttering cough, is the first sign that things are wrong. The smell is new, for one, sun-kissed petals tickling the soft fur on your muzzle, about your ears, causing your nose to twitch like it always would whenever Mo - whenever Toriel would do the dusting, and you were unlucky enough and foolish enough to be standing nearby.

You’re not meant to have lungs anymore, is the thing. You sat by the patch of golden flowers and waited for the end to come. Waited for white paws to shrink back into vines, for your borrowed time to run out, for the warm glow of contentment, of acknowledgment of the way things were meant to be, to fade and dim into the flat-lined _nothing_ that has and will continue to define your existence. Motes of pollen flurried gently in the air, in the gentle ray of sunlight that still brushed the petals layered over the grave by which you stood belated vigil, almost diluted beyond recognition. But you remember the Surface; how could you ever forget it? The golden flowers that inspired a faint thrill of recognition, of joy, even if you’d never seen them before. Those fatal hours were enough to have it all imprinted into the forefront of your mind, forever.

Now, the lungs you shouldn’t have hitch in a series of startled wheezes, and you have to clamp a white paw you shouldn’t have over a muzzle you shouldn’t have, and bite your tongue to keep from sneezing.

There’s a split-second impression burned into the backs of your lids with every blink, the muted glow of red and a glint of silvery white-gray that leave photobleached silhouettes when you stare at the nondescript, sheer slope of the walls surrounding the grave. There’s something anxious fluttering in your chest like a trapped bird, and there’s the double-beat of a heart - a triple-beat?

Your ears fall across your shoulders, but there’s the tickle of hair at your cheeks. The doubled sensation of having fur and not, simultaneously. A coursing vein of thoughts, of pleas and prayers, of formless orisons and muffled curses, running hot in your head in tripled variations, diverging wildly and crossing together and separating once more.

Don’t you have anything better to do?

Doesn’t _anyone?_

The smell of flowers, the warmth of faint, tingling sunlight - you shouldn’t be here.

The same thought runs counterpoint to your own, like a pair of whispers in the posterior of your fragile skull. One that hisses a perpetual bleed, a rapid-fire denial of the fact that they _are_ here, and the other that thinks, dreams, hopes, frantically, that _it worked._

It worked.

You know with utter certainty what _it_ is, with the half-turn of a head, the rustle of petals beneath your fur, and red eyes meet brown in a startling snap of two gazes aligning, staring simultaneously at and out of the eyes of the human that saved your SOUL not an hour or so prior, the desperate pulse of a SOUL warming the center of your chest.

It _worked._

*** Determination.**

 

 

**\--**

**Then leaf subsides to leaf.** ****  
**So Eden sank to grief,**

\--

 

 

And so the first time was much like the first cut - reassuring in the give of flesh, the pulse of crimson. Like redemption. Like penance.

That’s a laugh.

Human minds and SOULs are not meant to exist in apposition, pale lips to a set of corporeal ears, the asterisk that prefaces words of encouragement, or guidance, or advice, or directions. An impossibility in every sense of the word, an _anomaly_ with its SOUL reduced to glistening, crumbled fragments, pieces of what was once some semblance of a human child cobbled roughly together, fusing pieces of shattered redness together with a searing, inexorable _snap._ It had been the high, clear tone of breaking glass, only the glass was being _unbroken,_ a thin line of sap drooling into the gaps to bind the whole together, clear and coherent.

And, simultaneously, so very _loud._ So very unstable, ready to break and scatter at any moment. Only two hearts beating in tandem, not the whole of monsterkind, and yet enough to know exactly what **the Termination** would mean for a being, a thing, a fragment of an echo of a ghost of a dead creature like you.

It means nothing at all. There is the loop, there is the promise of an End, and there is that very same promise snatched away from between prying fingertips, simply because those hollow words about _consequences_ are nothing, in the end, but the empty oaths of an equally hollow thing. Not human, plainly, so therefore only _pretending to be one._ Not the greatest person, by all evident accounts, and therefore beyond any saving. The future of humans and monsters, they said, until there was no future, and then - no human left. Nothing but dust and a bloodied, bedraggled figure that could not so much as cling to life but only watch, helpless, as the body it was in decohered and its dust wicked away into nothing.

So _why is it still here._

It’s over. Everyone won, everyone was happy. No, a correction: everyone _relevant_ was happy. There were sacrifices to be made, of course, as always, and the narrative skews one way or another, on the _good_ people’s collective behalf. But there’s a nice and neat conclusion, an ending wrapped up in a pleasant little palatable bow, and no one has to wonder, aside from the vague question that never really got answered, why _is_ it that a child would climb a horrible old mountain like this one?

And why _is_ it that it is _still here?_

You’ve done your time, have you not? You’ve done what you were needed to do. You destroyed the world, you rebuilt the world. You watched it spin merrily by. You played the game, and you watched the game change. You whispered guidance when it was requisite, and slid the one-two-three numbers into very flesh and bone of the world’s matter when destruction became the human’s sole purpose.

Humans are so very good at that, are they not? Kill. Be killed. Except for when it matters, well and truly, and the last remnants of this dead thing’s echo should be relinquished, should finally fade into the ether, should finally be allowed to close its eyes and _rest,_ and instead, _instead,_ there is the dull ringing of a continuous tone in your ears, and the tickle of hair at your cheeks, _your_ cheeks! And none of the push-pull that accompanies having to share a single fleshy prison, no automatic, instinctive resistance to the flexing of fingers or the shifting of legs.

And there’s the beat of a SOUL, or something close enough like it, curled tight in your chest.

Or - three SOULs?

In three chests.

The phantom sensation of fur clinging to the backs of your hands, your skin, your scalp, and the digging of fingernails into the loose dirt, the ghosts of tear tracks streaking your face, except you do not, and _never_ cry, because you know what crying _gets you_ \- none of these are _you._

And you feel them all the same.

Your head turns, the blood pounding in your ears, _your_ ears, and you cannot articulate, verbally, with a jaw and a set of teeth and an esophagus you have not possessed in what can only be years, because each blink of an eye is the scratch of eyelashes across the empty air, the trickle-down warmth of fading sunlight against _your_ skin, and none of it _should be here_ and the thought erupts, half-formed, with all the explosive intent of a ballistic projectile -

_What did they do?_

The answer comes from both within and without, from two minds that sing in unison to each other and, disconcertingly, to your own, in perfect harmony, SOUL-red and cherry-bright:

*** Determination.**

 

 

**\--**

**So dawn goes down to day.** **  
** **Nothing gold can stay.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The poem used throughout the work is "Nothing Gold Can Stay" by Robert Frost.


	2. we are the poisoned youth

Chara is the first to react, unsurprisingly. They jerk roughly to their feet, cut-puppet-string wobbly, treading all across the delicate sunlight-dappled blooms cresting their grave. Their scarlet eyes are stretched wide, their breathing harsh and tense, and the roar of their thoughts is little else besides a protracted mental scream.

For their part, all Frisk can do is curl, tight and rigid, and clamp their hands over their ears, as if that will cut the sound that rebounds endlessly across the interiors of their skull. They should have known - and they  _ had  _ known, to a certain extent. The sharing of a SOUL means split control, split thoughts, split minds. They’d anticipated that there would be, must be, a certain level of bleeding over, and even the pun feels hollow and wrong. They’ve only ever listened to their Partner through a window askew; a murmur removed, a lifetime or two set apart, something echoing rather than the intense, immediate shrilling their thoughts are now, a turbid, confused, pained swirl.

They are every bit as destructive and powerful in their head as Frisk would have guessed they would be. That they must have been when they first lived. Thoughts too  _ loud,  _ nothing like the porcelain mask they clamp tightly across their features, the locked smile and the dulled gaze, something meant to be as impenetrable and distant as they strained to be.

None of it forms words. It is simply a branching, fractalling surge of wordless emotion, a blend too complex to be sorted into neat little packages, and their mind isn’t the only one.

Asriel is no better, even if he’s yet to spike in any predictable way. The pace of his thoughts are rapid and faint, like the beating of a hummingbird’s wings, like taking too many tiny breaths all at once. One paw is fisted over the fabric of his shirt, a handful of the fabric that rests above the place where his SOUL is, nestled in the hollow of his chest.

They receive little more than a spike of something startled and equally speechless, and every window opens.

Every window opens.

 

 

 

Rifting panic that comes with the memory flexing fingers too large, claw-like appendages, patches of fur and of skin, eyes with the sclera tinted red as though bloodshot, fangs too large for the warped muzzle they belong to. Ears flopping limply to either side, horns a tangled and half-formed blur, and the shrilling bellow that prefaced the crack of a gun.

A face ( **his face** , Chara’s mental growl assures them, and for a moment their thoughts snap into seamless alignment, and they don’t need to ask who **he** is) with a bristling moustache and a perpetual scowl, its features as rough as though carved from rock, taking a brutal swing over the crumpled body of a child he could not even bother to call by the right name.

_ You did this,  _ comes the words, sharpened into a spike and levered at their mental processes. Baleful red eyes turned upon them, all the suppressed  **anger** at a world that taught them nothing but  **v** iolence, now directed wholly upon the Partner that has, once again, saw fit to  _ chain  _ them here.

Those thoughts didn’t belong to them, but it’s grown impossible to separate. They never did realize - never could put together just how much of them was  _ them  _ and how much wasn’t them at all, whether they’re really even a person but little more than a patchwork assemblage of other people’s thoughts and  _ hopes and dreams. _

Another wordless blaze of a question, stemming from two directions at once. The grass and dirt is rough beneath their hands, fingers dragging through the dirt as they reach up, hands curling around their middle. This time Asriel fires the question off, though Chara is the one that verbalizes it, their composure frayed, their teeth bared in something akin to a snarl:

“Why can’t you just let me  _ go?” _

Frisk’s mouth opens part way to answer, only going as far as an empty stammer, a syllable that drifts uselessly, unmoored, before their head bows, bangs dropping to veil their hair.

“What’s  _ happening?”  _ Asriel’s voice is a muffled squeak; even without having to look at him, even with their watery gaze pinned to the floor, they can feel him trembling, ears shivering against his shoulders with how little he can sit still. And then, further still - Chara’s subsequent jolt of alarm when they realize they, too, can feel ears they do not have, a coat of fur they do not have, soft pads at the bottom of clawed fingers they  _ do not have. _

“What did you  _ do?” _

The words come from without and within, and from both sources.

They have no answer.

Shouldn’t be loud. Shouldn’t be...loud. So they don’t say - can’t say anything. Simply open a hand, palm cupped upward, and let the trembling remnant of their SOUL wick into existence.

It hovers an inch or so above their palm, bobbing idly, scarlet with determination, but heart-shaped no longer.

They tilt their chin, dark eyes lifting hopefully to lock with Chara’s. The child’s expression twists, comprehension and horror striking an ugly mix, and their hands open in an automatic imitation of Frisk’s gesture. It limns the tips of their hair, as warm and red as ripe fruit, as their own -  _ (the thought is painful, a retread of a life they’ve no right to think back upon)  _ \- must have been, once.

When their gaze swivels to Asriel, he’s already done the same. A third scarlet fragment rests there, its faint light bathing the tips of his fur in a wash of vermillion, deepening the red of his irises, wide and round as moons.

Three pieces of the same SOUL, suspended - cleaved into pieces without forcing the jarring, world-shattering jerk of a LOAD.

They whisper, the words nearly inaudible, clouded with both shame and something approaching reverence:

“You can feel it beating.”

  
  
  
  


 

 

Chara is first to break the spell. Their fingers close over their piece of SOUL and it disappears as easily as a stilling candle flame pinched into nothingness.

They don’t have to sharpen the word into a verbal barb; they hardly have to do anything at all. The mental demand of  _ How  _ slams across the mental space between them, and Frisk can’t prevent the instinctive hitch of their shoulders at the force of the word.

For a moment, the space surrounding the vacated grave is silent but for the syncopation of their breathing, three sets of lungs aching as they draw breath after ragged breath.

“I,” begins Frisk, and lapses into a huffing wheeze of air. Chara jerks oddly on the spot, one hand lifting and dropping back to their side in the same moment, the hand drawn tightly into a fist. The reflexive desire to  _ be there  _ for the other child, curled as they are in distress, can’t be completely nullified, despite the height of their rage.

The thought blisters with a coldness, registering that both the physical and mental giveaways were easily tracked and given form regardless.

“I got rid of my SAVE file,” Frisk whispers. They’ve lidded their eyes again, the length of their bangs saving them from having to look either child in the eye, veiling them from sight. If they let their vision drift and lose its focus, the blurred strands sharpen, tangled and greasy as they are, clinging to their scalp in unwashed, grime-streaked pieces.

Ugly. Ugly and disgusting.

Asriel pipes up with a pitifully reassuring comment - “no, you’re not!” - immediately undercut by the undercurrent of his thoughts, a slightly disgruntled, vague string of  _ what a mess  _ that immediately has Frisk ducking their head further. Chara fires their brother a vague mental shove. The texture of his thoughts cool and curl in on themselves like a dying spider’s legs.

They start counting the lines on their fingers, their knuckles, their wrists. One, two, three - one from “the cat” and one from “the stairs” and one from “the door,” and they can count most of them, but some they can’t remember ever getting, thin white markings that cut across the darkness of their skin and remind them of all the ways that  _ it’s still you. _

The unconscious echo of the words hums distantly, searing into alignment and then drifting apart again as Chara levers themself away, once again pinning the human opposite them with an inquiring, outraged glower.

“You - ”

For a moment, they seem wholly unable to form words. Their hands lift, trembling subtly, before dropping back to their sides, the plastic trying and failing to slot back into place, a smile that isn’t a smile at all, that shivers at the edges like something distorted by heat waves.

“You brought me  _ back.”  _ The word tears, nearly breaking in two in perplexity, in rifting fury. “You did this, you - ”

“Chara.” The word is quiet, checking the blistering, swelling bitterness of their frustration, their pained  _ resentment  _ at being once again chained to a world that refuses to let them go. To  _ people  _ who refuse, who  _ refuse  _ \- to simply  _ let them go. _ They feel it. They all feel it.

But it’s not Frisk who speaks. It’s Asriel.

“They wanted to SAVE everyone.” His eyes, a shade or two darker than Chara’s but no less vibrant, no less red, no less incisive, swing around to pin Frisk with a stare that’s both inquisitive and, vaguely, hopeful. “Didn’t they? Even us.”

“You  _ brought me back.”  _ A live-snake coiling of revulsion rears up in the pit of their belly, or all of their bellies, something glistening with a hatred that does not spike outward so much as it does, fiercely,  _ in.  _ Revulsion, at being unable to articulate any of it, at being far from the calculating, icily penetrating thing they should be, at simply repeating the same words uselessly over and over again, as though that will mend  _ anything,  _ will make it, any of it, hurt any less.

Revulsion over the sting of betrayal that buries itself into their heart like a shard of ice. Like an electric blue spear, or a fragment of bone, or a vine - and Asriel flinches, inadvertent, and can’t suppress the shudder of shameful apology that ripples from ears to tail-tip.

“Undo it!” snarls Chara, even if, in the same moment, a bolt of revelation occurs to them - to them or to Frisk, as they both reach for a SAVE file that no longer exists.

Frisk’s mouth flattens into a thin line, unrepentant.

“I can’t.”

Chara’s hands tangle into their hair, whatever they were planning to say next falling to pieces in their throat, emerging as nothing more than an abortive, choking sound. The intent of the words unspoken still cracks across the space between them, an electrified mental gauntlet hurled with the force of one of Undyne’s spears.

_ Why? _

Making a choice, a  _ permanent  _ choice, and then  _ scoring  _ it into the world’s very bones like a commandment! Self-righteous, unidirectional, unremitting, and so very,  _ very - _

Determined.

Because Frisk is  _ always  _ \- Determined.

“I had to.”

The whisper doesn’t feel as though it belongs to them; divorced from the air, from the mouthing of the words. Their hands haven’t dropped, since they first opened them and allowed their last piece of SOUL to hover above their cupped palms. They pulled inward, instead, hands curling around the fabric of their sweater that’s settled just above their chest, as though cradling the place in which their SOUL resides.

“I...had to.” The words are nearly inaudible - it is only thanks to the lack of breeze in this part of the Underground that they are heard at all.

“You didn’t  _ have  _ to.” Hardened, cold scorn, cast over the boiling indignation, the realization that’s still pooling in their gut. “You  _ wanted  _ to.  _ Why? _ ”

But the answer presents itself before they’ve even finished verbalizing the demand. It’s stark in the line of their shoulders, the vein of their thoughts, the way they cringe and flinch at each harsh-flung indictment even as their SOUL squeezes with a sense of what can only be described as  _ longing. _

“Alone.” They choke it out, one hand creeping up to dig into the corner of an eyesocket, as if that will tamp down the swelling of something hot and moist at the edges of their gaze. “I didn’t want to be - alone.”

“You’re  _ not.”  _

What was that, then? That happy lightshow, where everyone got their wonderful perfect ending, wrapped up nice and neat in a bow? Their fuming is too bold and furious to be stemming from anyone but the child who stands there with thin shoulders, shaking on the spot, their thoughts a torrential, unfocused swirl.

“You have - friends,” they hiss with an outthrust hand, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the purple-tiled hallway that terminates in a looming door, the single exit from the site of their grave that would take them to the Ruins and, from there, the rest of the Underground.  _ “Family.” _

Frisk shakes their head, their mouth a tight, firm line.

“Not family.”

“You called her _ ‘Mom’!”  _ The word brings with it a spike of inescapable envy, at the ease with which that last, latest fallen child had defaulted to the title without even thinking _ ,  _ at how comparatively difficult it had been for their initial counterpart to cede to the same, to assign the surname of  _ Dreemurr  _ to their own invented title. A wash of memory, of practicing the introduction in front of the mirror, voice dropping to a whisper the longer they went on trying, trying,  _ trying  _ to assign to themself a name that did not belong to them, because they could not belong here, they could not belong  _ anywhere  _ with a disconcertingly ordinary home and quiet, unhurried pitch of Miss Toriel’s voice and the rustle of tea leaves and the smell of garden soil and the pressing of fingerpads into the doughy beginnings of a pie crust -

The torquing, desolate trail down the fractured pathways of Chara’s own memories shatters with a gasp, with a willful twisting of their spiraling thoughts into themselves, fractalling them, splitting them, tangling them into each other and rendering them meaningless. The practiced, desperate destruction of self and identity and memory, drawing a line over a name that’s  _ Easy to change, isn’t it?  _

Something swells in the pit of Asriel’s chest, unsuccessfully tamped down. Something Frisk can’t hold onto before it disappears, because they never learned to read him the way Chara did, because they only ever knew him in pieces, in remembered words, in quieted memories. Sympathy, maybe. Uncertainty.

Chara covers their face in their hands.

Asriel’s eyes flick between the pair of them, silently.

“You…” Frisk swallows, their mouth dry. Their tongue peeks out to wet their lips, but the effort is sandpaper-rough, simply serving to tighten the vice around the lump in their throat. “I got...second chances. Lots more chances. Everyone gets one, here.” 

Thanks to their machinations. To their abilities. To their SAVE file.

“You didn’t.”

“I didn’t  _ want  _ one,” Chara counters, but the undeniable undercurrent of  _ didn’t deserve it  _ coats the words in an inherent contradiction, an explosive, irreversible, frustrated smear of thought that prefaces the agonized flare of sound that follows when they retreat, rocking back a step and turning away entirely, the disordered sweep of their hair veiling their face but doing absolutely nothing to mask the embittered, too-loud roar of their thoughts slamming outward in a furious, unchecked wave.

“If I’m allowed,” says Frisk, with a fraction of the squared-jaw determination that would set their shoulders, when things got truly bad, “then so are you.” The sweep of their dark gaze and the open door expanse of their thoughts is all the affirmation the other two need that they are, indeed, referring to both of them.

That earns them a pulse of derision from Chara; from Asriel, a mingled burst of inquisitive incredulity. A familiar blooming of self-righteous abandon in the pit of their chest to contrast the wet towel wringing at Chara’s insides, the pall of flat realization that Asriel can’t seem to shake himself from, even now.

Having spent so long without a SOUL, he’s not yet learned how to adjust to living  _ with  _ one. Even a fragment of one. That  _ happy lightshow -  _ Chara’s mentally bristling as he unthinkingly appropriates their terminology, picked from their head without thinking because he has never had to  _ ask  _ for anything, has he, not for most of his life and not for most of his not-life that came after - was an aberration, one spiking peak in the surrounding flatline.

“So?” Chara flings the word out in a startled, disbelieving spurt of noise, almost spluttered in its inelegance. Asriel jumps. “So  _ what,  _ then? You just thought you’d drag us all the way to the finish line?”

Frisk’s mouth tightens, ironing itself out into a thin, firm line. Neither child needs to be privy to the slow build of their thoughts to know that, from the tightness of their shoulders and the set of their jaw, that they’re all but ready to personally haul both of them to the Surface, all on their own. They’re maybe an inch or so shorter than Chara, but a mental nudge confirms what they’ve suspected from the start, since this began: that they’re still pulling together the shattered fragments of themself, enough to remember how to move without tottering about on fawn’s legs, so unused to the concept of having a body of their own ( _ flesh prison,  _ Frisk chimes in, a mental deadpan) that they’re still struggling to coordinate all their marionette’s limbs into one cohesive whole.

“If you  _ think  _ about it, it’ll never  _ work. _ ” For the first time, Asriel sounds exasperated, a spurt of sardonicism that sluices effortlessly through the sweet-faced demeanor he was so very good at presenting to his perceived audience of one.

Immediately, he cringes. The flow of his thoughts stutter, cutting short, doubling back on themselves and, in a pattern that’s aching in its familiarity, starts to shatter the trains of thought that terminated in his pronouncement, scrubbing every trace of Flowey’s sneers and smirks and taunts from his head, from his borrowed, cut-piece SOUL. Chara flinches, unable, for the moment, to mask the look of utter desolation that smothers the dead-eyed glare.

His head downward-spirals, sinking into a litany of  _ it’s not me it’s not me it’s not me it’s not me _ , blackholing the pair of them in for the ride with a fluid, effortless flare-and-drag of thoughts expanding outward and compressing in simultaneously. Timelines of memories inlaid upon each other, overlapping lines of dialogue, crushed to dust and burned to ash, rupturing out across the space of three minds before he lunges desperately across the mental carnage, annexing it with a speed and deftness that can only be called  _ feverish,  _ even if he performs it as though it were -  _ practiced.  _ Like he’s  _ done this  _ before.

_ Hair-editary,  _ Chara thinks, and immediately drowns the thought, their lip curling. Bad timing. A bad joke with bad timing, but  _ figures  _ they would have thought that, right?

The thought neither originates from nor belongs to Frisk, but the longer this goes, the harder it becomes to sort through the soup of diverting memories and emotions and fracturing timelines and pick apart the things that are, without question,  _ Frisk. _ It was hard enough when one SOUL ran piggyback to theirs, an astute sense of smell and a sharp tongue and a penchant for wordplay bleeding effortlessly into their vocabulary, to the point where they can no longer remember if they always liked jokes, or if that was simply -  _ inherited  _ from someone else’s mind. Borrowed. Stolen.

Their lungs are filling with heat, hot prickles shooting down their fingertips in sparking, branching pathways, pinging down the length of their spine in the familiar rush of a too-light head, lungs too small, pulled too tight. The sweat slicks their fur and -

Fur.

Fur that they don’t have. Fur that they don’t have, a set of burning lungs that isn’t theirs, because Asriel is  _ panicking  _ and Chara’s breath has assumed a ragged syncopation, something sharp and staggered and uneven. The digging of the tips of his claws into the loose earth, the sun-warmed soil muddying the snowy white of his fur, ghosts along the dark spider-legs of their own fingers, drawing tight into fists in a flexing pull, as if that might shake the sensation of their head starting to spin -  _ Asriel’s  _ head starting to spin. His breathing hitching, fresh heat pricking the corners of his eyes.

He reaches with one outstretched paw weakly, almost desperately.

Unthinking, Chara clasps it and pulls at him. He tumbles limply against his sibling, shoulders quivering in a noise that emerges halfway between a gasp and a sob.

“Breathe,” says Chara.

Any illusion of control, of patience, of calm that might be mantled across the word is lost in the rifting, breaking swell of their own nascent panic, both willing to recognize it for what it is and unable to acknowledge it.

_ “Breathe,”  _ says Chara, and it’s no longer clear if they’re talking to their brother or to Frisk or to themself or to all three of them.

Frisk lurches on the spot, loathe to cross the invisible line drawn between them since the depths of their actions came to light. Loathe to impede upon a family matter, to insert themself where they might not be wanted, must not be  _ needed.  _

Forgetting, for a moment, that doors open both ways. Forgetting that when they hazard a small mental nudge, it signals the fluid pull of his thoughts into theirs, bleeding at them with a formless gibbering they can’t hold onto. Their cheeks burn, or his do - they can no longer tell the difference. Chara’s fingers sting around their hand - around  _ his  _ hand.

Hot trails of moisture track down the fur of Asriel’s cheeks, and his hand finds Frisk’s in a seamless connection of fur to flesh in the same moments their thoughts key into alignment. 

“Breathe,” says Chara. The word is taut, and their control wavers, stretched thin like a rubber band. Their skin has blanched pale, their knuckles round blots of white against Asriel’s clammy paw.  _ “Breathe.” _

Frisk’s teeth set on an edge.

Asriel’s jaw cracks as he clenches it in the same moment.

He breathes. 

Frisk breathes. 

Chara breathes.

They all breathe until their heads stop snowing, and their world can widen beyond three children with joined hands.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title comes from a line from the song "Centuries" by Fall Out Boy.


End file.
